


4/8

by tinygrunt



Category: SHINee
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Past Character Death, Polyamory, idk how to use these tags, sad drunk jinki vs sad sober taem
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-15
Updated: 2016-02-15
Packaged: 2018-05-20 19:33:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6022207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tinygrunt/pseuds/tinygrunt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jonghyun's death was less than a year ago and neither of them have really recovered.</p>
            </blockquote>





	4/8

Jinki’s drunk. Taemin should have seen this coming.

“Let’s get you to bed, hyung,” Taemin tells him, trying to fight back the sadness rising in his chest. He’s been back from his night class for thirty minutes; when he first came in, he found the elder clutching at a bottle of whisky while staring blankly at the picture of Jonghyun on his phone’s background. “Come on, let’s stand up.”

Jinki blinks at him and laughs, continues to hold him strongly down with him. He’s got his arms clasped around Taemin’s waist and re-buries his face in the younger’s neck, taking in a deep breath, as if he’s trying to inhale him. “I’m not really tired,” he muses, kisses lazily at Taemin’s neck. It’s weird, really, and Taemin tries to squirm away from it whilst dragging them up. “Taemin-ah, _please,_ les’ just…”

When he gets them up, a struggle that he barely wins, Jinki’s weight sends them into a wall. The elder uses this to his advantage, pressing Taemin as far and hard as he can into it. He returns to the thin brunet’s neck, sucking hard enough to leave marks. Jinki likes leaving marks; he always has, but ever since Jonghyun died, it’s almost been a compulsive fixation. He’s grown more and more desperate, jealous, obsessive—and Taemin hesitates to label it as such, but it’s near toxic. 

But the sad thing is that he doesn’t think leaving could really be an option. What would they do without each other?

Jinki slides his large, warm hands up Taemin’s shirt and he suddenly feels like retching. Sex with Jinki hasn’t been the same, and understandably so, but the new exclusive dynamic of their relationship sets up a strange dynamic between the two of them. They’re close, they love each other desperately, but Taemin almost sort of feels like they’re strangers. 

“We can’t do this right now, hyung, you’re drunk.”

Taemin isn’t innocent, though. He’s just as clingy, just as reactive. He has small anxiety attacks whenever Jinki isn’t pleased with him in any realm, checks his phone on fixed intervals because going without contact scares him. If Jinki doesn’t respond within a certain amount of time a light bulb goes off in his head that shines directly on Jonghyun’s last text message to him, and everything that happened after it was sent. 

He thinks about Jonghyun a little too much. 

_“God fucking—”_

They both do. 

Jinki shoves off of him and in the split second that Taemin has before the elder is fully turned away, he’s able to see the pure look of distress (rage, pain, fear?) on his face. His actions are jerky, violent, as he moves towards their coffee table and kicks it, swings his arms towards everything sitting on top of it, then moves to flip it over. 

Taemin just watches. 

He can’t move. He can’t do shit. He just stands there and watches walls crumble that have been precariously built up since the death of their partner. “Damn it!” Jinki’s yell echoes around the apartment. Taemin doesn’t notice he’s shaking until Jinki’s shoulders are heaving. _“Godfuckingdamnit.”_

“Babe?” Taemin’s voice is soft, because he’s afraid. He’s scared. 

And that’s why he feels as if he can’t leave. Because he’s scared. Because he’s afraid of Jinki, because he’s afraid of a life without Jinki, because Jinki and Jonghyun are all he’s known for so long, because Jinki and Jonghyun set him free. “You’re gonna leave me, too,” Jinki tells him then, shoves back his hair that’s stringy with grease or wetness or both. He still won’t turn around. “It’s his… I’m…” _It’s his birthday. I’m upset._ “You know how long Jong and I were together? Forever. I’ve known him f’rever. And we fell in love with you and brought you in with us and you made us so happy, but then… he was gone, ‘nd I don’t know. I love you so much but with Jonghyun there was something…”

“Let’s not do this right now,” Taemin walks forward, shaking his head, feeling parts of him break that he thought couldn’t ever again. He hugs Jinki from behind, delicately, yet anxiously. “Let’s go to bed. I think you just need sleep.”

“Just let me…” they stagger towards the room, Jinki attempting to spin around to face him. But Taemin doesn’t want to look him in the eye right now. Taemin wants darkness and Taemin wants to not feel at all. “Jonghyun and I knew each other for almost seventeen years,” he mumbles, and they make it to the room. It’s black as pitch inside and Taemin urges him in the direction of the bed, away from the light switch. “He was my person. You are, too, but Jonghyun, he was…”

He can’t leave but he really fucking needs to. He’s failing school and he’s scared of everything and he’s cut off ties with nearly everyone he’s ever known, save for Jinki, who’s the broken axis of his dingy world. “Shut up,” Taemin tries to shove him onto the bed, but now that he’s free, Jinki pulls him down, too. Taemin can smell the cigarettes and alcohol on his breath. 

Or maybe it’s Jonghyun, still. Maybe they’re both their own little planets and Jonghyun is the fading sun that’s keeping them on orbit, on its way to becoming a red dwarf, preparing to swallow them both.

“Jonghyun died. Jonghyun was my person but he killed himself. I was in love with him but he’s gone.” Jinki tries to wrangle Taemin out of his clothes and the younger fights him on it until he hears the tears slipping into Jinki’s voice, the poison. His limbs feel just as heavy as the lead solidifying in his lungs. “That’s fucked up. That’s some fucked up shit. And you’re going to leave me too and then I’m going to wish I’d been the one to go, because everyone I’ve ever loved will be gone.”

Taemin closes his eyes and pretends like he’s not crying, like he’s not in the process of imploding. When Jinki kisses him like this he takes himself back to a time when he was happy, when he felt like everything was right with the world. When Jinki fucks him he thinks of Jonghyun’s songs, of Jonghyun playing them in the living room while Jinki makes breakfast and Taemin tries to sing along. He erases what they’ve become and everything that’s led up to this point. He erases the images of himself sitting alone in the little study with Jonghyun’s guitar, strumming silently along with the only traces he really has left of the man’s soul. 

He thinks he’s too dependent on people. He thinks he just needs to be needed.

Taemin closes his eyes and feels loved, feels the rosary around his wrist, and tries to remind himself of a time when his heart could actually beat without bruising.

**Author's Note:**

> hello uwu 
> 
> this was initially supposed to be part of a much longer story that i just realized recently is never going to happen so that's that i guess


End file.
